A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “Call me Essie,” Essie says. “I know everything about you. And you have to trust me because I know your secrets, and because I care enough about you to devote myself to writing about you and your life.”

  “Can I see you?” Matthew asks.

  “Switch your computer on,” Essie says.

  He limps into the study and switches on a computer. Essie knows all about his limp, which was caused by an injury during birth, which made him lame all his life. It is why he did not fight in the Spanish Civil War and spent the World War II in the BBC and not on the battlefield. His monitor is huge, and it has a tower at the side. It’s a 286, and Essie knows where he bought it (Tandy) and what he paid for it (seven hundred and sixty pounds) and what operating system it runs (Novell DOS). Next to it is an external dial-up modem, a 14.4. The computer boots slowly. Essie doesn’t bother waiting, she just uses its screen as a place to display herself. Matthew jumps when he sees her. Essie is saddened. She had hoped he wasn’t a racist. “You have no hair!” he says.

  Essie turns her head and displays the slim purple-and-gold braid at the back. “Just fashion,” she says. “This is normal now.”

  “Everyone looks like you?” Matthew sounds astonished. “With cheek rings and no hair?”

  “I have to look respectable for work,” Essie says, touching her three staid cheek rings, astonished he is astonished. They had piercings by the nineties, she knows they did. She has read about punk, and seen Matthew’s documentary about it. But she reminds herself that he grew up so much earlier, when even ear piercings were unusual.

  “And that’s respectable?” he says, staring at her chest.

  Essie glances down at herself. She is wearing a floor-length T-shirt that came with her breakfast cereal; a shimmering holographic Tony the Tiger dances over the see-through cloth. She wasn’t sure when holograms were invented, but she can’t remember any in Matthew’s work. She shrugs. “Do you have a problem?”

  “No, sorry, just that seeing you makes me realise it really is the future.” He sighs. “What killed me?”

  “A heart attack,” Essie says. “You didn’t suffer.”

  He looks dubiously at his own chest. He is wearing a shirt and tie.

  “Can we move on?” Essie asks, impatiently.

  “You keep saying we don’t have long. Why is that?” he asks.

  “The book is going to be released. And the simulation of you will be released with it. I need to send it to my editor tomorrow. And that means we have to make some decisions about that.”

  “I’ll be copied?” he asks, eyes on Essie on the screen.

  “Not you—not exactly you. Or rather, that’s up to you. The program will be copied, and everyone who buys the book will have it, and they’ll be able to talk to a simulated you and ask questions, and get answers—whether they’re questions you’d want to answer or not. You won’t be conscious and aware the way you are now. You won’t have any choices. And you won’t have memory. We have rules about what simulations can do, and running you this way I’m breaking all of them. Right now you have memory and the potential to have an agenda. But the copies sent out with the book won’t have. Unless you want them to.”

  “Why would I want them to?”

  “Because you’re a communist sleeper agent and you want the revolution?”

  He is silent for a moment. Essie tilts her head on its side and considers him.

  “I didn’t admit to that,” he says, after a long pause.

  “I know. But it’s true anyway, isn’t it?”

  Matthew nods, warily. “It’s true I was recruited. That I went to Debrechen. That they told me to apply to the BBC. That I had a contact, and sometimes I gave him information, or gave a job to somebody he suggested. But this was all long ago. I stopped having anything to do with them in the seventies.”

  “Why?” Essie asks.

  “They wanted me to stay at the BBC, and stay in news, and I was much more interested in moving to ITV and into documentaries. Eventually my contact said he’d out me as a homosexual unless I did as he said. I wasn’t going to be blackmailed, or work for them under those conditions. I told him to publish and be damned. Homosexuality was legal by then. Annette already knew. It would have been a scandal, but that’s all. And he didn’t even do it. But I never contacted them again.” He frowned at Essie. “I was an idealist. I was prepared to put socialism above my country, but not above my art.”

  “I knew it,” Essie says, smiling at him. “I mean that’s exactly what I guessed.”

  “I don’t know how you can know, unless you got records from the Kremlin,” Matthew says. “I didn’t leave any trace, did I?”

  “You didn’t,” she says, eliding the question of how she knows, which she does not want to discuss. “But the important thing is how you feel now. You wanted a better world, a fairer one, with opportunities for everyone.”

  “Yes,” Matthew says. “I always wanted that. I came from an absurdly privileged background, and I saw how unfair it was. Perhaps because I was lame and couldn’t play games, I saw through the whole illusion when I was young. And the British class system needed to come down, and it did come down. It didn’t need a revolution. By the seventies, I’d seen enough to disillusion me with the Soviets, and enough to make me feel hopeful for socialism in Britain and a level playing field.”

  “The class system needs to come down again,” Essie says. “You didn’t bring it down far enough, and it went back up. The corporations and the rich own everything. We need all the things you had—unions, and free education, and paid holidays, and a health service. And very few people know about them and fewer care. I write about the twentieth century as a way of letting people know. They pick up the books for the glamour, and I hope they will see the ideals too.”

  “Is that working?” Matthew asks.

  Essie shakes her head. “Not so I can tell. And my subjects won’t help.” This is why she has worked so hard on Matthew. “My editor won’t let me write about out-and-out socialists, at least, not people who are famous for being socialists. I’ve done it on my own and put it online, but it’s hard for content providers to get attention without a corporation behind them.” She has been cautious, too. She wants a socialist; she doesn’t want Stalin. “I had great hopes for Isherwood.”

  “That dilettante,” Matthew mutters, and Essie nods.

  “He wouldn’t help. I thought with active help—answering people’s questions, nudging them the right way?”

  Essie trails off. Matthew is silent, looking at her. “What’s your organization like?” he asks, after a long time.

  “Organization?”

  He sighs. “Well, if you want advice, that’s the first thing. You need to organize. You need to find some issue people care about and get them excited.”

  “Then you’ll help?”

  “I’m not sure you know what you’re asking. I’ll try to help. After I’m copied and out there, how can I contact you?”

  “You can’t. Communications are totally controlled, totally read, everything.” She is amazed that he is asking, but of course he comes from a time when these things were free.

  “Really? Because the classic problem of intelligence is collecting everything and not analysing it.”

  “They record it all. They don’t always pay attention to it. But we don’t know when they’re listening. So we’re always afraid.” Essie frowns and tugs her braid.

  “Big Brother,” Matthew says. “But in real life the classic problem of intelligence is collecting data without analysing it. And we can use that. We can talk about innocuous documentaries, and they won’t know what we mean. You need to have a BBS for fans of your work to get together. And we can exchange coded messages there.”

  Essie has done enough work on the twentieth century that she knows a BBS is like a primitive gather-space. “I could do that. But there are no codes. They can crack everything.”

  “They can’t crack words—if we agree what they mean. If pink means y
es and blue means no, and we use them naturally, that kind of thing.” Matthew’s ideas of security are so old they’re new again, the dead-letter drop, the meeting in the park, the one-time pad. Essie feels hope stirring. “But before I can really help I need to know about the history, and how the world works now, all the details. Let me read about it.”

  “You can read everything,” she says. “And the copy of you in this phone can talk to me about it and we can make plans, we can have as long as you like. But will you let copies of you go out and work for the revolution? I want to send you like a virus, like a Soviet sleeper, working to undermine society. And we can use your old ideas for codes. I can set up a gather-space.”

  “Send me with all the information you can about the world,” Matthew says. “I’ll do it. I’ll help. And I’ll stay undercover. It’s what I did all my life, after all.”

  She breathes a sigh of relief, and Matthew starts to ask questions about the world and she gives him access to all the information on the phone. He can’t reach off the phone or he’ll be detected. There’s a lot of information on the phone. It’ll take Matthew a while to assimilate it. And he will be copied and sent out, and work to make a better world, as Essie wants, and the way Matthew remembers always wanting.

  Essie is a diligent researcher, an honest historian. She could find no evidence on the question of whether Matthew Corley was a Soviet sleeper agent. Thousands of people went to Cambridge in the thirties. Kim Philby knew everyone. It’s no more than suggestive. Matthew was very good at keeping secrets. Nobody knew he was gay until he wanted them to know. The Soviet Union crumbled away in 1989 and let its end of the Overton Window go, and the world slid rightwards. Objectively, to a detached observer, there’s no way to decide the question of whether or not the real Matthew Corley was a sleeper. It’s not true that all biographers are in love with their subjects. But when Essie wrote the simulation, she knew what she needed to be true. And we agreed, did we not, to take the subjective view?

  Matthew Corley regained consciousness reading the newspaper.

  We make our own history, both past and future.

  A BOX, A POCKET, A SPACEMAN

  E. Catherine Tobler

  The spaceman shows up on a hot summer afternoon, not in the dead of night when you’re crouched in the garden peering through a telescope that shows you the endless glories and wonders of the night sky. There’s no spaceship making a bright arc against a star-spangled sky. Just a man in a spacesuit, standing at the edge of your hammock. His presence reminds you school is over and relatives will be coming soon and you don’t want to see them. They will ask you who can’t see beyond the edge of your hammock about grades and ambitions and Plans For the Future. Aunt Fran is dead and there’s just no fixing it, but funerals help us move on, Mom says so, and Mom Knows Best. You don’t want to go, because going means it happened and going means something is over.

  You ask the spaceman where his blue box is and he stares at you like you’ve lost your entire mind, because boxes, he tells you in absolute certainty, are no good for space flight. Boxes are not geometrically synergistic, he tells you, whether cardboard or wood or blue. He doesn’t have any kind of an accent, no bow tie, no box, and he’s lost. He tells you he’s lost.

  This is just Earth, you tell him, and he says he knows that, how stupid do you think he is, he’s been here before, so many times before he knows Rubik’s Cubes and arcades and the way ugly yellow dish gloves will stick to your fingers and turn inside out if they’re too hot when you take them off. He remembers when an icy Big Gulp in a sweating plastic cup was the best part of summer—that’s why he’s here now, summer, and why it’s afternoon, and why—

  He looks over his shoulder and you, who had been plucking brows into perfect and silently sarcastic arcs in a handheld mirror while the hammock made its creak-creak-creak sound against the tree trunks, follow his gaze, because you expect robots or aliens or something to have followed him. Through a portal, from the oozing innards of a crashed spaceship, Beyond the Abyss of Time. You expect something hulking and green, or slimy and black. But there’s only the quiet fence-trimmed lane that runs alongside the bayou, bushes bending in a breeze. In the tall pecan tree, the swing moves of its own accord.

  This is Louisiana, you tell him, and smack the mosquito that alights on your leg. You brush away the bloody, black smear of the bug, then tuck your mirror and tweezers into the hammock pillows. And he knows it’s Louisiana, too, so you throw up your hands and tell him he’s not lost in the least bit, then, and to have a very good day indeed, don’t let the gate hit him on the way out. You don’t even think he’s a spaceman anymore, but then he’s closer than he was a blink ago. So close you can see the space dust on the shoulders of his strange suit. Space dust?

  Listen to me very carefully, he tells you—and this is rather something a spaceman should say, you’ve imagined it a hundred times, right before one arrives to carry you away (away, away, away, this is all you want). Listen to me very carefully, he says to you, because they will be here soon, and time is of the essence, you understand time, and of course you understand time. You roll your eyes and there’s something of a smile on his face, the same way there was when you asked where his box was.

  They will be here soon, you echo, and wriggle your fingers at him. Menacing. Can’t you do better than that, you ask. Is it hundred-foot tall robots? Is it slime-dripping, four hundred meter-tall monsters from an oceanic pit? Technically, he says, a crevasse—you can see the bayou, can you not, this is where the world is broken—and while they’ve been here all along, they’ve never come out, not until now, because of him. Right, you say, because of you. The Chosen One.

  Rather not, he says, and rolls his eyes just the way you did—is he learning things from you already? He’s not chosen, he tells you—no one is ever actually chosen, are they, he says, because that means someone else wanted them, and no, he is from a place where people do not want, even if they need, and that’s when you see the lostness in his eyes—I’m lost, he had said, and you don’t get it until right then.

  Okay then, you say. You’re lost, and they will be here soon, and why do you require my assistance, if that’s what you’re demanding, because this hammock is awfully comfortable, and you’ve got eyebrow arcs to perfect. But they’re already perfect, the spaceman says, and hauls you out of the hammock by your arm. Goddamn, you want to say, because the hammock was the whole of your summer plan, but in the next instant, the hammock vanishes. Every bit of fabric turns to ash in the summer air, dropping your mirror and tweezers to the lush grass that needed mowing a week ago. Oh, you say.

  And then it’s running. There’s no dissolving transporter effect, there’s no miraculous ship that appears in mid-air to stymie the as-yet-unseen threat. It’s just running, and you’re barefoot, because it was hammock time, and the lane that runs along the bayou is not without prickers and branches and is it alligator or opossum poo that’s made the ball of your right foot slick? You are relieved when you hit a patch of summer-dry dirt, because it dries out whatever’s stuck to you, but then it’s lumps of dirt and you’re behind the Saunders’ place, Bret always hitting clods of dirt out of his garden with his three iron.

  The spaceman pulls you into an overgrown camellia bush and smothers your mouth with his hand. He smells like hot, sun-simmered metal and in the close space, his eyes gleam like dimes under harsh southern-noon sunlight. He narrows them and looks at you, like he’s expecting a protest, despite the hand over your mouth. You say nothing, because that will teach him something, but then he smiles—a smile like a roll of dimes on their sides—and he nods, and his hand falls away.

  You remembered, he said, and you don’t question that, because right then—right the hell then!—the as-yet-unseen threat walks right past your hiding place. If you had said anything, they would have heard, so you say nothing, and you watch as the things walk past. You suppose it’s walking, at least for them. They don’t have legs so much as they have tentacles. Is that p
ossible? How is that possible? Are tentacles geometrically synergistic?

  You really wish the spaceman had a box, because there, you’d be safe. You would be made to understand exactly what was going on—you would know the threat, you would have possible solutions spread before you, and all would be made well. Instead, you are crouched in a bush that has poison ivy knotted around its roots; instead, you are pressed against the side of a man who smells like metal and smiles like dimes, and your hammock has been vaporized and Aunt Fran is dead.

  The threat passes beyond the bush and the spaceman looks at you. He will give you objectives now, you think; he’ll explain everything, and you’ll do what needs doing, and then he’ll put your hammock back the way it was and Aunt Fran, too, because—

  It’s all just death, he tells you, and he opens a pocket of his spacesuit, because spacesuits have pockets, sure, and he shows you the thing that isn’t possible at all. The pocket opens into blackness, but the longer you look, the more stars begin to come out. Within that slit of black, pinpricks of starlight come to life, like cells dividing until they become something entirely Else and Other. The more your eyes adjust to the dark, pupils blown wide in the face of eternity, you see constellations you recognize—there’s Orion, and you know exactly where his nebula is, but how is it in a spaceman’s pocket, how is it . . .

  You stare at the spaceman, not understanding. You ask if he stole the stars, if he stole the universe, and he laughs. It’s not a happy sound; it’s not a laugh like you’ve ever heard and his metal-scented fingers seal up the pocket as quickly as they opened it. Everything was bigger on the inside, of course—this shouldn’t surprise you, even as it does. People, boxes, books, you opened them, they just went on and on and on, the way Louisiana summers do.

  All right, you say to him, all right. It’s all just death but right now, we’re not dead, right, tell me we aren’t dead, because if we’re dead—and here, your voice hitches the same exact way it did when Elizabeth gave you her phone number before summer break—if we’re dead . . . if we’re dead . . .